How many strong tags is too many

[pauledwards]

Hi everyone, just a quick question, what are your views on the use of strong tags in content? how many is too many?

What is you have strong tags around every keywords for a sentance etc?

[SteveOllington]

Well yeah that wouldn't be too many at all, but then going back to what Marcus and EGOL said you're much better off using bold tags for readability reasons than simply using it on keywords really. It has little to no impact in terms of rankings (probably a tiny bit) but can have a much greater impact on keeping your visitors moving forward and converting if used to break the content up into more digestible chunks with a good scent of what's important to them and where their eyes should go next.

I'd probably use bold a few more times in a 500 word piece but use it as what it is, an emphasis tag Not emphasising keywords for Google but whatever it is in the content that will encourage the user to feel they're in the right place... if that happens to combine with some keywords or keyword phrases then great, but don't see it as a game-changer for rankings

[pauledwards]

Its keywords that are bold, so i guess perhaps 1 or 2 for around 500 words would be about right?

[SteveOllington]

I suppose if you were going to look at it as "how many is too many" though it would be a percentage density instead of an actual number because it would depend on the size of the piece.

If you had a 1,000 word page then 50 words in bold might look okay but if it were a 100 word page then 50 words in bold would be ridiculous.

[Marcus_Miller]

Exactly (the everything is important bit, not agreeing with me).

[EGOL]

I agree with Marcus...   When you make everything important then nothing is important.

[Marcus_Miller]

If you have to ask that  question, I would say you are using too many.

The on page tool looks for one instance of a keyword in either a strong, bold or em tag so if you are doing this for SEO, the prevailing common sense  would be that any more than that one is too many.

If the highlighting provides some kind of benefit for your users then you can do more but if you are looking at bolding lots of text for SEO - then forget it.

The best  answer is to just use common sense and create something that is readable with the important keyword highlighted if you can do so in a natural way.

Hope it helps. 
Marcus